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1.

I was born in April 1935 and spent my early childhood in Lewisham and from the spring of 1941, in Croydon. Soon after my birth, I appear to have been handed over to carers in whose hands I remained, until my adoption in 1941. My new, adopted parents, had no other children, either their own or adopted, so there were no siblings. Consequently, I can convey little of any family life, although both my adopted parents came from large families — mostly living outside London — my father’s in East Anglia and my mother’s mostly in Kent, with one sister living at Stratford in East London. At this stage I remember very little of anyone else and so can only provide impressions. The following story is taken from some autobiographical notes, written for therapeutic purposes.

The process and experience of adoption coincided with the War and at an age in which the experience was bound to exert a powerful impression. Even though at its beginning I was too young to understand what it was all about or what was actually going on, I was very aware of something very dramatic, frightening and out of the ordinary.

Like many children at the time in not being evacuated, my most vivid memories are related to the encounter with air-raids. Nowadays their playback on various media triggers an acute mental replay, coupled with a certain irritation that however technically proficient, the effort can never reveal the awful reality. Without the close proximity of injury and death, and hence fear, there is a danger it merely becomes entertainment.

2.
At the address in Manor Gardens, Lewisham, where I was living before my adoption, many hours were spent — day and night — in an air-raid shelter, a small cramped space where a dim light bulb revealed dark, bear brick walls, cold and oozing the smell of dampness. Sometimes this strange environment was filled with soft gentle voices; the close and intimate voices of confined space. These were often drowned out by extraneous sounds, covering the shelter like an outer layer; a constant and powerful echo of violent impacts, where walls and floors shook and bunks, stacked close and high, seemed to rise and fall with a terrifying suddenness. At such moments, the gentle voices sometimes became loud and agitated - occasionally changing to what seemed distress.

Alone in this shelter during quiet periods, time was often given to browsing a book of well-known nursery rhymes, each illustrated in a different, bright colour, which left a strange and vivid impression. On one such day, lying on a top bunk, I looked down and noticed water covering the floor, and rising slowly until all the lower bunks were submerged. The fear of being engulfed compelled me to scream and yell, for what seemed a long time when suddenly daylight appeared, reflecting off the surface of the water. The entrance had opened and someone made their way down, wading up to their neck towards me. Taken from the bunk and carried, aloft, to safety the powerful sense of relief when brought out into bright daylight was overwhelming. Years later, I learnt — among many other things I was later to learn about the war - that a near-by water main had been burst by bomb blast.

3.
Most of us would consider it quite natural to feel some anxiety if you were subject to such as an air-raid, especially if very young. But air raids, particularly at night, seemed more than merely ‘scary.’ They were something else. During the day, as evening approached, simple things became portents - the angle of sunlight, the onset of twilight, the swish of blinds to secure the ‘blackout’. Even the clocks ticking the hours away, impregnated everything with a feeling of dread - not consciously thought, but felt, from the deaths you had heard about and the damage you had seen, there was a strong possibility, you would not see the next day.

A peculiarly oppressive, even haunting, atmosphere permeated all night-time raids, even when there was little or no activity; a sudden plunge into another dimension - of intense anticipation. The noise alone of a heavy raid could be terrifying and once experienced you will never ever forget. Some claimed to have slept through, but this seems hard to believe - unless they were, deaf and probably then, the vibrations would wake them. Night after night of such stress and loss of sleep left you physically drained — rather like the after effects of a long illness. During a raid - especially when most heavy, or of long duration, all sense of time was lost and the night seemed endless.
Even when not in the immediate vicinity, the constant whine of enemy bombers; the rumble of bombs and guns could still be heard ten or more miles away; quite often for most of the night.

4.
Naturally my adoptee, parents took their new responsibilities seriously and I was always packed off to bed around 7pm. In these early years, I would often awake to hear the sound of the first air raid sirens, usually around 9 or 10pm. First, those very remote and hence feint, and they seemed deliberately designed to make the blood run cold, with a plaintive, mournful quality - all the more so because of what they were associated. They came to symbolise the war in its entirety, featuring in dreams. The local sirens soon followed, louder, echoing with an eerie resonance through deserted suburban streets. Prompted, I would bury my head under the bedclothes knowing this was a futile gesture. From the moment the warning was given, my whole being was on full alert.

To reinforce the sense of urgency, the sirens were the signal for my mother’s arrival at the bedside, to collect and take me downstairs. Her approach clearly heard on the old stairs that creaked loudly in the night. The upstairs windows being without blinds, she carried a torch that had brown paper wrapped over its beam, so as not to infringe the blackout regulations; her face was just visible in the surrounding darkness, as feint light from the torch reflected back up from the bedclothes.

The sirens having sounded, everything was at first quiet except sometimes, for the sound of a distant tram or, beneath the window, running footsteps — someone hurrying home to their Anderson shelter perhaps, or to some public shelter. We, having no shelter because the house was unoccupied during their distribution a few years earlier, remained downstairs in the kitchen, where my mother always kept a small-lighted candle on the table. There was no electricity and it was considered too dangerous to use the gas lighting during a raid. My father always argued public shelters were of little use in providing real protection and anyhow, he claimed, you had to fight for space each time. As young as I was, I was instinctively aware that however unsafe in reality a shelter might be, it offered at least the illusion of safety. Another reason given was that there was sometimes looting of bombed or damaged houses, but also, by now — after my adoption and move - the consistency and number of raids was beginning to drop off. Some nights, despite the sirens, there was little or no activity — at least not over our immediate area — so I suppose my parents felt able to take risks.

In the tiny kitchen we waited silently, I, staring at the small blue and yellow flames that danced up and down in the fireplace surrounded by the red glow of dying embers. Occasionally my attention shifted to the patterned wallpaper. Subdued in the candlelight, the floral designs turned into strange shapes and creatures that reshaped themselves the longer I stared. A huge grotesque shadow would occasionally stretch itself up the wall and across the ceiling as my father passed through, dressed in his Home Guard great coat and helmet. He was on ‘fire-watch’ — which meant he was in and out regularly, up and down the stairs, since the fear was of incendiary bombs silently penetrating the roof and starting a blaze in the loft or landing on the beds. A bucket of sand and another of water, with a stirrup pump was kept in the hall, just in case.
The waiting and the silence sometimes seemed interminably long but it was usually only a matter of some twenty minutes or so before, the distant rumble of anti-aircraft guns, like distant thunder, was heard; the windows and stacked crockery rattling gently in unison.

Moments later, the feint drone of scores of aero-engines instantly recognisable as those of the enemy. The sound of large formations of aircraft approaching was always an awesome event, even when they were our own, but German aircraft, for obvious reasons, sounded particularly sinister. They produced a uniquely whining, throbbing sound, different from that of our own, which tended to have a more even, consistent drone.
With the Germans it was claimed the crews, deliberately fluctuated engine speeds to confuse the sound-locators, used by ground defences before the introduction of radar, but these characteristics can apparently be related not only to the different engine and fuselage design, but to height, direction and atmospheric pressure.
Sixty years later it is still possible to have one’s memory jolted by the melancholy, high altitude whine of a single, propeller driven aircraft, that passes over London nearly every night, very late or in the small hours.

‘Are they coming our way? Charlie’, my mother would sometimes ask my father when he occasionally popped in off the street. He would mumble some reply, while I, with knees knocking together, silently but fervently prayed they would not ‘come our way’, but once the enemy was overhead you knew you were entirely in the hands of fate.

The guns near-by opened up, producing a merciless barrage one after the other, sounding like large heavy doors inside some vast empty building being vigorously and repeatedly slammed. The noise was of such ferocity, that a neighbour once likened it to the artillery fire he had experienced on the Western Front in the previous war. They were sometimes joined by a powerful but consistent machine gun-like, sound, which my father, years later explained, were ‘Swedish Bofors guns.’ At the foot of our small back garden ran a railway line and apparently, these things were towed up and down the line during raids.

By now the bombs had started falling - with seemingly tremendous power; as if tearing their way down; loud, rasping whistles, descending in pitch, and ending with enormous thuds of deep explosion, which seemed to penetrate to the core of every bone. You felt the chair and floor pulse beneath you. Some fell with a piercing scream, which I learnt, were deliberately designed to maximise the terror. The candle would flicker and often went out suddenly with the force of their blast, which my mother would re-light, fumbling nervously with the matches.

During the worst moments my mother took me onto her lap, holding me tight and bending over to protect me. On one occasion, the house quaked violently, bringing down large pieces of ceiling and wall plaster, amidst clouds of dust, which got into my mouth and nose. My father brought news that a bomb had just missed us, exploding at nearby West Croydon station.
Although there were targets of strategic interest close by — an industrial estate to the West and to the East, the large and complex Selhurst railway junction - the bombs seemed to be released randomly. Everywhere and anywhere, as if the whole area was a single target — which of cause in a sense it was.
Occasionally, when my father had opened the door I could catch a glimpse of the outside world, painted in a dull orange-red light, interspersed with the blue and white flashes of the guns, while sparks fell like rain and cascaded along the ground.

Towards daybreak, when the enemy had at last departed, an unusually eerie silence descended - the silence of trauma perhaps - in contrast with the terrible noise, and fear, earlier. It was broken occasionally by the distant sound of raised voices, or of ambulances and fire engines roaring through the streets, their bells clanging wildly.

The wail of the All-Clear was sometimes not heard until as late 8am. I was sometimes left on our old Victorian sofa in the kitchen, a blanket thrown over me, because the bedroom had been too damaged, while my father had gone to work. During the war, as far as the authorities were concerned, loosing sleep every night was no excuse for not going to work. My father worked in a rubber reprocessing plant recycling peacetime products for use in military equipment, and had to be at work by 7am. While I was left to get some sleep my mother would try to clear up any debris, broken glass and dust etc, around the house. How she coped with no sleep I do not know - but she did. Sometimes workmen arrived to replace windows or repair the roof if damaged by shrapnel or blast. On a few occasions, after a week or so, they would arrive to replace ceilings that had been brought down, which they did very quickly with plasterboard and battens. The end of the war saw nearly every ceiling in the house replaced.

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